Bill would make sex between teachers and students under 18 a crime

Carol Adler says she had a sexual relationship with her high school English teacher in the 1970s that filled her with remorse and a guilt that lingered into her adulthood.

The Patriot Ledger

Carol Adler was 16 when she says her high school English teacher in Quincy first started making advances. Adler said those moves turned sexual during her junior year, after her father died and she was her most vulnerable.

For the next two years in the mid 1970s, Adler said she and the teacher continued the affair, even though he was more than a decade her senior and married with two small children. Adler said the relationship filled her with remorse and a guilt that lingered into her adulthood.

“I was derailed,” said Adler, now 49 and a mother of three. “It wasn’t until my children got to that age that I looked back and said ‘My God, that was why I had such a difficult time.’”

Now Adler is pushing a bill that would make sexual intercourse between teachers and students under 18 a criminal offense, regardless of consent. The bill is slated to come up for a public hearing at the State House today.

While sex between adults and anyone under the age of 16 is already covered by statutory rape laws, there is no criminal prohibition on teachers engaging in consensual sexual relations with students 16 or older.

In the Quincy case, the teacher resigned in 2005 after Adler complained to school authorities. He also voluntarily surrendered his teaching license without admitting wrongdoing after the state Department of Education opened an investigation into an alleged past relationship between him and a student. The investigation was closed after he gave up his license, said department spokeswoman Heidi Guarino.

State Sen. Mark Montigny, the bill’s sponsor, said that although sex with a student can cost a teacher his or her job, the possibility of jail time would add another layer of protection for students.

“There’s nothing clearer than a deep thick line that says if you break this line you will be held criminally liable,” said Montigny, D-New Bedford.

Cases of teachers allegedly having sex with students can go unnoticed or unreported for years.

Adler said that while she told her husband of the relationship before they married, she was too embarrassed until recent years to report it to Quincy school authorities.

“When I met him I was 16 and I had won a local beauty contest, I was an honors student, I had a little cute boyfriend,” said Adler, who lives in Mattapoisett.

By the end of the affair, when she was 18, Adler said she was “a wreck.”

“A student and a teacher are different than two people in that kind of situation who aren’t in a power relationship,” she said.